Review: The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East, by Eugene Rogan
Basic, 2015. 485 pp. $32
Not everyone will be interested in how and why the Ottoman Empire entered the First World War, and what resulted, but maybe they should be. Pick any current headline about that region, and you’ll find its roots in Rogan’s narrative, whether it’s Turkish denial of the Armenian genocide, machinations over Iraqi oil, or the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Of the four imperial thrones that the war toppled, Westerners probably know least about the Ottomans. (The other three were Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia.) Turkey, having fought two revolutions and three wars between 1908 and 1914, needed peace desperately. By playing the Russians off against the Germans, Turkish diplomats adeptly sought promises that would allow their country to remain neutral. But hawks who feared that their empire would break apart unless Turkey backed the winning side, successfully pushed to join the Central Powers.

You have to wonder how history might have played out had Turkey stayed neutral. What, for instance, would have happened to Palestine and the oil-producing regions? I wish Rogan had devoted space to this, but he doesn’t go in for speculation. Rather, using an astonishingly impressive array of Turkish, Arab, and European sources, he traces military campaigns and the politics that influenced or resulted from them, quoting the participants. Rogan argues that the diplomatic promises the Allies made to each other, Arab nationalists, or Zionists, derived from panic (usually overblown fears of jihadists) or fuzzy, short-term thinking. If pressed, Allied diplomats would have insisted they had promised less than the potential beneficiaries believed. Little did they know how their words would be parsed for decades to come.

From the military side, Gallipoli gets much of Rogan’s attention, deservedly so. From the Turkish perspective, the Allied invasion signified the Crusades revisited, an attitude prevalent in the Middle East today concerning Western military power. The Turkish victory, which cost the Ottomans even more lives than the Allies, resulted from tenacity and brilliant generalship. The Allied disaster came about from ad hoc strategy executed by inept tacticians; if you believe, as I do, that the British and imperial soldiery were lions led by donkeys, Gallipoli could be Exhibit A. Rogan captures the misery, the heroism, and the fear, as with this memoir of the last moments before “going over the top”:

The moments appeared like hours–the suspense–then the officer, his eyes glued on his watch following that finger (of death) slowly, so slowly, but surely moving to destruction–maybe a second left to live–for this is sacrifice–this is the moment when all hearts are sad and heavy–when you will hear some muttering a prayer. . . .

But the greatest service Rogan renders in The Fall of the Ottomans is, I think, his thorough, vivid, and decisive handling of the Armenian genocide. To show how the tension between Turk and Armenian increased, he explains Turkish fears of Armenian collaboration with the Russian enemy, for which there was some evidence. As for what followed, Rogan names names, places, dates, and, when possible, numbers. His chilling descriptions recall aspects of the Holocaust, as with eager civilians who participated, or long, forced marches, during which thousands of Armenians, dying of thirst or starvation, were clubbed or bayoneted to death. I didn’t know that Greek Christians were deported and dispossessed (though not killed), or that Assyrian Christians met the same fate as the Armenians. These facts, rarely mentioned, are surely significant.

Turkish soldiers march Armenians to prison in Mezireh, April 1915, photographed by unknown German bystander (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

After the war ended, the Turkish government prosecuted eighteen defendants accused of ordering or carrying out the massacres, hanging a few and convicting the others in absentia. (Armenian agents tracked down the missing defendants and assassinated all but one.) Apparently, the Turks were trying to placate the victors, hoping to gain favorable peace terms. When that didn’t work, the country went to war again, led by Mustafa Kemal, the hero of Gallipoli, and fixed the borders more to Turkish liking. Whether that resentment led to Turkish intransigence about admitting the genocide, Rogan doesn’t speculate.

I’d have liked The Fall of the Ottomans much better had the author written more carefully. The narrative, full of repetitions and clumsy phrases, plods sometimes. But if you read this book, I guarantee that you won’t look at Middle Eastern politics in quite the same way again.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

“Fortune favors the brave,” wrote Virgil, a saying that describes both Thomas Keneally’s approach to this extraordinary tale and its two protagonists. Naomi and Sally Durance hail from Australian cattle country and a home where domestic duties wore their mother down before her excruciating death from cancer. Determined to pursue a different, more independent path, few of which exist for women in 1915, as trained nurses, they volunteer to serve the Australian forces in the Great War.

But despite what they have in common, Naomi and Sally have never been close, so they sail overseas with much left unsaid. And the elephant neither of them speaks about–a rather hefty creature, in this case–is that both sisters hoarded enough morphine to grant their mother her final wish, to die with no further suffering. What happened, exactly? Sally isn’t sure, and Naomi, who was there at the last, may or may not have told the truth.

Recruiting poster for Australian nurses, Sydney. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons; from the Library of Congress )

From this premise comes a riveting story that spares nothing and no one and grabs you until the last sentences. It’s not just the hospital or dressing-station scenes at Gallipoli and northern France, conveyed with unflinching realism, or the grotesque blasphemies that steel, gas, and flame inflict on human flesh. It’s the fear that grips the nurses, which they can’t help breathing in, like the fetid odors of the wards: Be careful what attachments you form, because nobody’s safe.

How the Durance sisters cope with this terror frames the novel, especially given their sibling rivalry and mother’s death, an irony that they face daily in their work as healers. Their relationship matters more than any other, even when they allow men into their lives. There are flirtations and romances between many nurses and soldiers–how could there not be?–but the author takes care to give the women conversations and desires that have nothing to do with men.

I’d have liked even more of that, but I think Keneally does well. He goes even further, portraying the nurses’ struggles in which love or justice don’t necessarily triumph. A spoonful of sugar may help the medicine go down, but Keneally is too good a novelist and historian to offer the reader cheap candy. That’s why I was disappointed at how often he tells the reader what the characters feel, rather than show it. The clumsiest instances involve his reminders, early on, that Sally hasn’t forgotten her guilt about her mother’s death–as though she would, or anyone would assume so.

The heavy hand also blunts the way British officers treat Australians, which was no doubt shabby in reality, but tiresome here nevertheless. Every British commander in this novel seems criminally negligent, while the Aussies just do things better. Strangely, too, despite the realism Keneally insists on, the Durance sisters somehow have no trouble finding good food and drink on days off spent in hungry, ruined French towns.

Naomi’s character puzzled me, sometimes. She seems downright cold, for no apparent reason I can figure from her upbringing. Is this a simplistic authorial device with which she can keep the world (read: men) at a distance? If so, a woman of her intelligence and aplomb could have achieved the same result with subtle sexual diplomacy. To me, that would have made her more complete and believable, refining what’s already a compelling book.

If you’ve never read a novel about the First World War–or even if you have–TheDaughters of Mars is superb, faithful to the events and passions of the time, a human, moving story. I recommend it.